Food Vainglorious Food

This Sunday’s book review is a food issue, which is cool…I went to see Michael Pollan talk about food at BookPeople last week. It was only about an hour long, but it was enough to convince me to shop at local farmers’ markets. He had many insights about corn– yeah, corn— and how it’s become a huge percentage of what we eat: Americans use it to grow grass quicker; feed it to cows (whose rumens, or digestive sustems, are only used to grass), chickens, pigs, and even fish; put it in sodas and most desserts; use the starch and meal in most non-dessert carbs; fry things in it; and on and on. You can read more about it in Pollan’s newest book, The Omnivore’s Dillema, in which he “follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal.”